References
- I am very grateful to the Gerda-Henkel-Stiftung (Germany) for providing me with a research-grant between October 2007 and June 2008.
- Denoting the German term ‘Sinn’, comprising the full range of ‘sinnhaft’, ‘sinnerfüllt’, ‘sinngebend’ etc., but also meaning openness—as a special sense—for a spatial and temporal horizon of one's own life and of the lives (past, present and future) of others.
- According to E. Straus’ definition communication is sympathetically being with the world, comprising both sympathic and antipathic relations of the type striving for…or fleeing froM&Hellip;: Sympathetic relationship is due to our sensing, prior to the gnostic intentional mode of perceiving. Cf. Erwin Straus, Vom Sinn der Sinne. Ein Beitrag zur Grundlegung der Psychologie, 2nd extended edition, Berlin/Göttingen/Heidelberg: Springer 1956, esp. pp. 329–350.
- Helmuth Plessner, Lachen und Weinen. Eine Untersuchung der Grenzen menschlichen Verhaltens (1940), in Gesammelte Schriften, VII, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1980. Here Plessner undertook an analyses in collaboration with the biologist and physiologist F.J.J. Buytendijk at the University of Groningen. Hereafter LW.
- Unfortunally, there is not enough space to appreciate Plessner's thoughtful analyses in a separate interpretation. I am only using them as a vantage point for my further steps.
- For this intercultural issue, Cf. K. Oka, “Die Bedeutung von ‘Werden’. Unterschiede in der Sicht der japanischen Psychopathologie zur deutschsprachigen”, Nervenarzt 74 (2003), pp. 30–34. Oka emphasizes the differences between intended, unintended, yet not vegetative, expressions by the characteristics of ‘acting’ and ‘becoming’. In his approach, it is the ‘act of becoming’ expressed on this fundamental level which has been overlooked in Western psychopathology or misjudged by psychoanalysis or depth-psychology, yet underlies somehow culturally formed expressive values.
- And it is this procedural structure that v. Weizsäcker will analyze in the field of pathological disorder; yet, ‘the pathological’ is not opposed to an abstract norm but is an individual transformation of our pathic existence.
- Expression is instantaneous, is temps durée, and contains its value in itself; action has a linear, spatial character, is temps espace and gains value of function for the sake of something else.
- For the distinction between the ‘what’ and the ‘how of givenness’, see the gnostic and pathic-pathetical categories in the next section.
- For the different aspects of Der Gestaltkreis see: Viktor von Weizsäcker, Der Gestaltkreis Theorie der Einheit von Wahrnehmen und Bewegen, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1973 (Hereafter Gestaltkreis); von Weizsäcker, Pathosophie, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1956; von Weizsäcker, Der kranke Mensch. Eine Einführung in die medizinische Anthropologie, Stuttgart: K.F. Koehler 1951; von Weizsäcker, Begegnungen und Entscheidungen, Stuttgart: K.F. Koehler 1949.
- And this is in the range of the expressive openness as becoming.
- As an example: a pathological over-sensitivity or over-irritability might not necessarily be understood as a disorder of a ‘normal’ psychophysical state: this, insofar as this ‘pathology’ might be its own new way, new form—let us say: an own gestalt—of expressing a person. And even, this Gestalt might be known better, we might be acquainted better with it and ourselves than by an ‘abstract norm’ (we might be better acquainted with our fears than with any statistic figure of a possibility of that fear coming true).
- Cf. Plessner's prequisites for comprehending human nature, above p. 5.
- Comprising emotions, self-perceptive and perceptive states.
- This is, for Weizsäcker, not our contemporary ‘Applied and Medical Ethics’, but an ethics of personal conduct between therapist and patient, evolving from a genuine praxis in an intersubjective here and now and the individual history of this very situation.
- To cite v. Weizsäcker and his original German description: „Das Ontische ist, das Pathische leidet; das Ontische ist ein Sein, hat Dasein, das Pathische ist überall, wo der Wortstamm des Leidens vorkommt, Leid, Leidenschaft, Pathos, Pathetik, Sympathie, Pathologie, Pathogenese. Die Krankheit, das Kranksein gehört dazu. Der Begriff des Pathischen ist nur ein viel weiterer als der der Krankheit, Nicht nur sie, aber auch sie ist ein Treffpunkt der großen, zentralen Negativität in unserem Lebensgefühl, oder…in unserer Existenz.” (Begegnungen und Entscheidungen, p. 108)
- Thus, “the pathic can be defined as the origin of willing and of the ought” (Gestaltkreis, p. 270).
- You might hear here the constitutive correlation of ‘Leben’ und ‘Erleben’, of temps vécu and temps espace.
- “We only realize a subject adequately, when it is imminent to disappear”. (Gestaltkreis, p. 253f.)
- Along with its subject-object-constellation that challenged Husserl's models of ego and alter ego and later on Scheler's theory of sympathy. All these approaches lack an understanding of comprehension different from assimilating the other and its states of consciousness. What comprehension can approach and capture is a shared field of acquaintance: not with the other's consciousness, but with his or her time of becoming in mutual intercourse with (intersubjective) world and the time where trust and hope are entangled with intersubjective projections about a future, about mutual alteration, about a mutual aging (Schutz), finally a mutual and joint transcendence of blocked horizons of sense.
- Trust as the joint ground and hope as its horizon for transcendence.